Viewpoint: I'm a college senior and I'm terrified

My whole life, I’ve wanted to be older than I am. I’ve wanted to make my own choices, have responsibility and have people see me as someone who is confident and knows what they’re doing.

But as I begin the last year of college, I am not-so-quietly hoping that I actually get mistaken to be younger. In previous years, I would be so offended if someone thought that. Don’t I look old? Don’t I seem mature? But now, I like to remind people that I’m just 21. I only got my first speeding ticket last week. I’ve never done taxes. My apartment’s first aid kit is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-themed.

Since this year marks my last in college, it also acts as the last year of buffer between the real world and myself. The real world — at least as it appears from the many think pieces published about it — is one where being incapable of very simple things — like knowing how to void a check (you just write void on it, apparently) or the vital difference between the low oil level icon in your car and the change oil icon — makes you the center of one of the many Millennial-bashing, Internet generation-hating articles.

The truth is that the real world is as foreign to me, it seems, as Twitter is to my parents. For them, Twitter is a thing they are confused by. In attempting to figure it out, they make hilarious mistakes. Eventually, though, they get the hang of it. Twitter — as long as you aren’t making a bad joke that has the potential to go viral — is a place where a person can make mistakes fairly consequence-free. For me, the real world is just as confusing but the consequences are very real. If I don’t figure out how to deal with my speeding ticket soon, there’s going to be bureaucratic hell to pay.

And while I stumble and undoubtedly flail and fail through this foreign new world, there will be the Baby Boomers — people like some of my parents’ friends on Facebook or commenters on Millennial think pieces — that will roll their eyes and huff and puff about the complete uselessness of people like me. They’ll bemoan the generation where everyone was given a trophy for participation and complain about how we still live with our parents, even as student loans, rising rents and the growing uselessness of the regular old bachelor’s degree keep us trapped in our childhood bedrooms. And while all this happens, I’m becoming more and more afraid that I’ve become one of the people they constantly complain about.

I know many incoming seniors must feel the same as I do: a deep apprehension for what lies after college and becoming the typical Millennial that is featured in those articles. But if my increasing age has taught me anything it’s that, in the end, Taylor Swift was right. The haters are going to hate. And more than that, the haters are going to get old and watch the generation they complained so much about begin to run the world.

Kermit the Frog sang that it wasn’t easy being green, but he also sang green is also the color of spring. So, while being green in the real world is scary, it also means bringing something new and new isn’t bad at all.

Mary Jarvis is a student at Cornell University and a summer 2015 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent.